Researchers have found a way to marry human creativity and artificial intelligence (AI) creativity to dramatically boost the performance of deep learning. A team led by Alexander Wong, a Canada Research Chair in the area of AI and a professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, developed a new type of compact family of neural networks that could run on smartphones, tablets, and other embedded and mobile devices. The networks, called AttoNets, are being used for image classification and object segmentation, but can also act as the building blocks for video action recognition, video pose estimation, image generation, and other visual perception tasks. "The problem with current neural networks is they are being built by hand and incredibly large and complex and difficult to run in any real-world situation," said Wong, who also co-founded a startup named DarwinAI to commercialize the technology. "These on-the-edge networks are small and agile and could have huge implications for the automotive, aerospace, agriculture, finance, and consumer electronics sectors."

Health IT company Cerner is leveraging its partnership with Amazon Web Services to launch a new cloud-based health platform to incorporate artificial intelligence to improve usability and provide predictive insights for patient care. The new platform, called Project Apollo, brings a more cognitive approach to practicing medicine, Cerner Chairman and CEO Brent Shafer said during his keynote address at Cerner Health Conference, according to a company press release. Shafer said the new platform will leverage Cerner's health care technology and the AWS infrastructure to accelerate the speed that innovations are integrated by removing manual steps for clients that slow the pace of adoption. Cerner also is creating an "intelligence ecosystem" to innovate next-generation user experiences and care delivery algorithms, the company said. We're looking to return the joy of delivering medicine, and we're focused on innovating for the future and delivering better usability today," Shafer said. The Kanas City-based company also announced new predictive modeling tools to help reduce opioid abuse, improved dashboards and analytics, and a new capability aimed at enhancing interoperability in the healthcare industry. In July, Cerner announced a collaboration with cloud giant AWS, which is part of Amazon, with the aim of accelerating healthcare innovation. As part of the agreement, Cerner named AWS its preferred cloud provider. During his keynote speech, Shafer said Cerner will focus on several key areas in its broader strategy to innovate with Amazon, including turning data into insights, increasing interoperability and usability, and rapid development and deployment, according to the Kansas City Business Journal. Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence for AWS, also spoke at the conference on the partnership with Cerner and the possibilities that arise when companies can access "infrastructure as if it was a utility, according to the Kansas City Business Journal.

The traditional drug discovery starts with the testing of thousands of small molecules in order to get to just a few lead-like molecules and only about one in ten of these molecules pass clinical trials in human patients. Insilico was able to ideate and generate a novel molecule from start to finish in 21 days. In a similar technique used by DeepMind to outcompete human GO players, GENTRL -- powered by generative chemistry that utilizes modern AI techniques -- can rapidly generate novel molecular structures with specified properties. Insilico has made GENTRL's source code available as open source. "The development of these first six molecules as an experimental validation is just the start," said Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO of Insilico Medicine.

Alibaba Group has introduced its first AI inference chip called'Hanguang 800' which performs machine-learning tasks efficiently and quickly. The neural processing unit is already being used to power features on Alibaba's e-commerce sites, including product search and personalised recommendations. The Hanguang 800 will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers at a later stage. According to Alibaba, its ecommerce website Taobao previously took an hour to categorise one billion product images that are uploaded to the site each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalised recommendations. However, with the Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to finish the task in just five minutes.

Dell Technologies Australia and New Zealand managing director Angela Fox has painted a future where humans and machines learn to live in harmony and machines evolve to be consumers. Delivering the Dell Technologies Forum keynote in Sydney last week, Fox discussed research that was conducted with the Institute of the Future, which looked at the next era of human-machine partnerships. Fox touched on three developments that she expects will shift the economy in the future, with the first being autonomous commerce. "We believe that you'll see machines evolving into consumers. They will use a mix of sensors, software updates, and artificial intelligence (AI) to determine when they -- and the people they serve -- are functioning sub-optimally, but more importantly, they will find ways to remedy it autonomously," Fox said.

When being empathetic is your full-time job, burning out is only human. Few people are more aware of this than customer service representatives, who are tasked with approaching each conversation with energy and compassion -- whether it's their first call of the day or their 60th. It's their job to make even the most difficult customer feel understood and respected while still providing them accurate information. But over the last few years, an unlikely aide has come forward: artificial intelligence tools designed to help people tap into and maintain "human" characteristics like empathy and compassion. One of these tools is a platform called Cogito, named for the famous Descartes philosophy Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

One of the hottest trends in technology is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the market is set to generate $70 billion by next year. While AI is poised to transform countless industries around the globe, it has already started to generate a lot of fear from the humans who will be living and working alongside the machines. Titles like "AI overlords" and "AI hiring managers" have everyone on edge. Despite the hype, hysteria, and fears surrounding AI, automated robots are not set to bring our sci-fi-fueled nightmares to life -- at least not anytime soon. A lot of the panic stems from the implication that these smart robots will soon replace their human counterparts in the labor force.

The blacklisted companies include Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are global providers of video surveillance technology. Hikvision said in a statement Monday that it respects human rights and strongly opposes the Trump administration's decision. The company said it has spent a year trying to "clarify misunderstandings about the company and address their concerns," and that this will hurt its U.S. business partners. Prominent Chinese AI firms such as Sense Time, Megvii and iFlytek are also on the list. Sense Time and Megvii are known for the development of computer vision technology that underpins facial recognition products, while iFlytek is known for its voice recognition and translation services.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said halting the firm's research in China would "hurt more" than it resolved, despite concerns around cybersecurity and human rights. In an interview with BBC News published on Thursday, Nadella discussed Microsoft's research in China, and emphasized what he called the "open" nature of his firm's research. He said: "A lot of AI research happens in the open, and the world benefits from knowledge being open. That to me is been what's been true since the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Therefore, I think, for us to say that we will put barriers on it may in fact hurt more than improve the situation everywhere."

The insurance industry is responsible for a multitude of sensitive financial data concerning both its customer base and staff. Any breach to an insurance company's CRM or other claims database could compromise the personal data of multiple people at once, which puts the company at risk as well. However, there are always new cybersecurity innovations, and this includes AI and machine learning-based solutions. In this article, we explain how artificial intelligence applications can help insurance companies protect their networks and databases from cyberattacks. We cover how predictive analytics and anomaly detection can be instrumented within a large enterprise network's security system and how it can counteract these threats.